Conventional physical layer management (PLM) systems are typically designed to track connections that are made at a patch panel. That is, historically conventional PLM systems have been “patch panel centric” and have not included functionality to track connections that are made at other types of devices and systems in a network. For example, such PLM systems typically do not automatically track connections that are made at a switch, router, hub, gateway, access point, server computer, end-user computer, appliance computers (such as network-attached storage (NAS) devices), and nodes of a storage area network (SAN) or other types of devices (also referred to here as “host devices” devices or just “hosts”). Although there are management systems that are used to manage and collect information about such hosts, such management systems are typically separate from the PLM systems used to track connections made at a patch panel.
For some types of host devices, the cabling used with such devices is different from the cabling used elsewhere in the network (for example, the cabling used at a patch panel). For example, some host devices make use of so called “active electronic cables” that include an optical transceiver module attached to at least one end of a pair of optical fibers. That is, the active optical module is a part of the cable assembly instead of being integrated into the host device. The active optical module includes the active optical components that perform the electrical-to-optical (E/O) and optical-to-electrical (O/E) conversions necessary for signals to be sent and received over the fiber pair. The switch interacts with the active optical module using an electrical interface. As a result of the differences between the cabling used with such host devices and the cabling used with patch panels, PLM technology used for tracking connections at a patch panel historically has not been used to track connections made at such host devices. One consequence of this is that PLM systems have typically not had access to information about connections made to such host devices.